The 42-year-old comic thrilled the Wimbledon audience with his caustic observations on racial and sexual politics.
For a comedian who bandies around the words ‘c***’ and ‘n****r’, Reginald D Hunter’s audience at the New Wimbledon Theatre – decidedly white, middle-aged, middle-class – came as a surprise on the surface.
But the 42-year-old comic has put in a lot of groundwork on the circuit to get him up to the stage of his own filmed tour (DVD out today), having started off stand-up as a dare, gigged heavily and featured on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You?, 8 out of 10 cats and QI.
Here, ‘Reg’ manages well the tricky balancing of satisfying both those used to his caustic observations on racial and sexual politics – his poster for Pride & Prejudice…& Niggas was banned from tubes – and those only aware of the televisual Reginald D Hunter Lite.
Indeed, the show starts with a disclaimer for his language. “Faggotry”, we learn, is not a derogatory term for homosexual behaviour as such but unnecessarily complication like health and safety.
And ‘n****r’ is not a derogatory term for black people but a term to describe any old honest Joe struggling to make ends meet, which he hastens to add includes 99% of us nowadays.
Most of the show is astute observational comedy on the oddities and nuances of our approach to the other gender and other races. See for one, his gag explaining the ridiculousness of women’s ideas on what men want.
“Men don’t like a challenge. What man has ever said: ‘I love p***y, but I wish it was just a bit harder to get?!’”
He adds all men really want is a woman that’s in the room and doesn’t stink of s*** – though the latter may be negotiable.
There’s a (un)healthy splattering of toilet humour, in the story of his unbridled joy and sense of peculiar union at sharing a urinal with a unknown Belgian to save time at a club. And also in one audience repartees in which he discusses who’s seen their own arsehole (he has) and how this is for him a barometer of trust.
Where he is not quite so strong is his broadsides at society at large, clearly influenced by his fiercely subversive support act, but without Hughes’ panache.
But, as he aimed to, Reginald D. Hunter certainly fulfilled his contractual obligations…to all comers.
